by Peter Mohlin
He connected the laptop to his phone and went online. After a few clicks, he was in the register and able to search for Matilda Jacoby. He was grateful that it was such an unusual name. The number of hits ought to be limited.
He waited while the cursor turned into an hourglass and the search was processed. After a few seconds, he saw the list of hits on the screen. There were three Matilda Jacobys in Sweden, of which only one had been born in the 1980s. The other two were well past retirement age.
He clicked on the appropriate name and was provided with all the addresses where the girl had been registered. The first was an apartment in Hallonbergen outside of Stockholm. Judging by the years, it was her childhood home. Matilda had then spent two brief periods in other apartments in Stockholm suburbs, before she had registered at an address in the municipality of Charlottenberg in 2008.
John checked again.
Yes, he’d read it correctly.
Matilda Jacoby was registered as a resident in Charlottenberg.
The cup of coffee had already gone cold. He swallowed the rest of it and looked up the address. It was only a couple of kilometers from the treatment center he had just left.
His interest rising, he checked whether there were any public records of homeowners in Sweden. He wasn’t let down by his old homeland. In a long post on the Flashback forum someone described how best to stalk an ex-girlfriend who had dumped you. There was a link to the real estate registration database and instructions about which information was accessible and how to search for it.
John silently thanked the crackpot and clicked on the link. He entered the address and waited. This database was apparently run on antiquated software. The hourglass spun for what felt like an eternity before the computer spat out the result. When it finally appeared, it made him raise his eyebrows.
Torsten Andreasson.
The property where Matilda Jacoby was registered as a resident was owned by the manager of Björkbacken. The same man who had refused to disclose the girl’s name and who had responded to a direct question by saying he didn’t know where the girl had gone after her stay at the treatment center.
John threw the empty coffee cup to the ground, got into the car, and screeched back onto the road toward Charlottenberg. He wanted to drive through those black gates, push that voiceless bastard against the wall, and ask why he had lied to the police. But once he calmed down and thought it through, he decided to go to the address he’d just discovered. If Matilda Jacoby was there, he didn’t want to give the manager a chance to speak to her before John did.
The house he was looking for was in a copse of trees near a sharp bend in the road that led to Björkbacken. John must have passed it driving to and from the treatment center earlier. He braked hard and had to reverse a bit in order to turn onto the patch of gravel in front of the house.
If Björkbacken was elegant and well tended, then this was the exact opposite. Several tiles had fallen off the roof and were lying in pieces in the long grass. Two of the windows facing the garden were covered in plywood and it was hard to see what color the wooden façade of the house had once been.
He turned off the engine and walked toward the front door. Nightfall was approaching and the dense trees around the lot prevented the fading rays of daylight from making it through. It seemed unlikely that anyone lived here. Nevertheless, John knocked a couple of times before trying the handle. The door was locked, but it was in such poor condition that he knew all it would take to open it was a strong tug. His grip firm, he pulled and almost fell over backward when the lock and its surround came right out of the doorframe into his hand.
Once he regained his balance, he looked into a hallway with a rag rug on the floor and a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Beneath the coatrack was something he thought looked like rat droppings, and hanging on a solitary hanger was a blue quilted coat.
He went inside and pulled the door shut as best he could. To the right was a doorway leading to the kitchen, which was spacious and furnished with a gateleg table with four mismatched chairs around it. A low kitchen counter ran along the wall, interrupted by a stove and a fridge. He kneeled to look behind the latter and saw that it wasn’t plugged in.
Then he went into the room behind the kitchen. The former servant’s room was furnished with a camp bed, a stool functioning as a bedside table, and a large wardrobe made from untreated wood.
He went back into the kitchen, but stopped when he saw a figure in the garden. There was someone standing under one of the trees, looking toward the house. Only when the man took a few steps out of the shadow of the leaves did John see his face. It was the manager from Björkbacken.
The two men sat down at the gateleg table in the kitchen. Torsten Andreasson put his hand to his throat and activated the voice generator.
“I suspected you’d be here.”
“Why is that?” said John.
“I understand that you’re angry. It was stupid of me to lie.”
“Stupid because you were caught or stupid because you’re obstructing a police investigation?”
John met the manager’s gaze, fixing his eyes on the man until he looked away and stared down at the table.
“Both,” the man said. “I like Matilda and I want to help her. She had nowhere to go after Björkbacken. The other girls went home. So I let her live here—the house was empty anyway.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Helping patients privately is against protocol. As a therapist, you’re supposed to maintain a certain distance. If it came out that I was letting a girl from Björkbacken live in a house that I owned, it would be bad for my own reputation and that of my business.”
“ Didn’t she have parents who could help her?” John asked.
“No. Most of the girls who come to us come from families with money. They’ve been given everything, but somehow they still end up in treatment. But it was different with Matilda.”
“Different how?”
“She couldn’t really afford Björkbacken. I’ve got a friend who is a social worker in Stockholm. He called and asked whether I could offer the girl a place for the standard municipal rate. I sometimes do that for particularly deserving cases. I also think it’s good for the princesses here to meet people their own age with different life experiences.”
The manager took his hand away from his throat. He seemed to want to catch his breath. Maybe it was more effort for him to speak than John had initially thought.
“And Matilda had those—different life experiences?” he said, encouraging the man to carry on.
“Yes, you could definitely say that. Alcoholic single mother from a Stockholm suburb. Criminal record from a young age due to shoplifting, and then later theft and drug possession. In a normal treatment center, her story would be commonplace—but here it’s something special and perhaps got some of the other girls to appreciate everything they’ve been given in life. Don’t get me wrong, you can be unwell even if you’re rich—and I have a lot of empathy for our patients. But there’s no harm knowing that the world can look very different to others.”
“How long was she here?”
Suddenly the manager looked sad.
“It only lasted a few weeks after she was discharged, then life out in the woods got too much for her. One morning when I came to visit, her bags were gone and the house was empty. I realized she’d gone back to Stockholm and was going to lapse into her old habits.”
“And she never came back?” said John.
“Yes she did, after about six months. One evening, I saw a light on in one of the windows and knocked on the door. She opened up, looking in an awful state. She asked whether she could stay while she went cold turkey. I said that was fine. She wanted to start a new life and needed to get away from her friends in Stockholm.”
“Did you believe her?”
“She probably meant what she said. But I’ve seen how drugs work. Some girls don’t have what it takes to stop and Matilda proba
bly falls in that category, unfortunately.”
“So, she left again?”
“Yes, and came back again a few months later. And it’s gone on like that for ten years. She has her own key and comes and goes as she pleases. She’s usually here once or twice a year. She always looks after herself when she’s here, and I usually fill the fridge so that she can feed herself.”
“When was she last here?”
The manager thought. “Sometime last autumn. We hadn’t put up the Christmas decorations at Björkbacken, but it was already dark early in the evening. October, perhaps. Possibly November.”
John took a deep breath before asking the next question that had to be asked every time a middle-aged man offered help to a young woman.
“How would you describe your relationship with Matilda?”
The manager raised his hand to the voice generator, looking agitated.
“Can’t you see that this is why I didn’t say anything to you before? Matilda was a patient and I want to help her—nothing more.”
John thought the man’s desire to help Matilda seemed genuine, but he had learned not to rely on pure intuition. He was going to check out Torsten Andreasson as soon as he got back to the police station for any charges of sexual misconduct.
“Do you know where she is at the moment? I need to get in touch with her.”
The manager looked out of the window.
“It probably won’t be easy to do that. I don’t have her phone number or email address. Her mother is dead now and Matilda won’t tell me where she lives in Stockholm. Not even whether she has somewhere permanent to live—she’s still registered here. I guess that’s how you found the place?”
John nodded.
“What about her mail?” he said. “If she’s registered here, she must get mail sometimes.”
“Sure. It doesn’t happen often, but there’s the occasional letter in the mailbox. I keep them and give them to her every time she comes, and when she leaves the pile is always still on the kitchen table.”
The manager smiled wryly at this tragicomic ritual.
“I’d like to take a look at it,” John said.
“I knew you’d be interested,” the manager replied, disappearing back outside to the bicycle he had arrived on. When he returned, he had a plastic shopping bag, which he handed to John.
“Here’s all of it, sorted into folders for each year.”
John reflected that it was a much more cooperative Torsten Andreasson that he was meeting this time. Maybe the letters were compensation for lying and withholding information.
“If she shows up, please call me right away,” he said as he took the bag.
The manager promised to do so and John decided he could probably trust him. The man looked as though he wouldn’t dare mess with him again.
20
The cramped steel box made its final journey back to the police station parking garage. The coffee John had taken away from the breakfast buffet at Gustaf Fröding slopped over the edge of the cup and burned his fingers as he changed lanes near the old barracks. Of course the cup holder was too small for the cup. The Spaniards hadn’t even managed to succeed at something that basic.
John licked his fingers before the black liquid managed to drip onto his trousers. He had no intention of letting the car ruin his mood today as well. When he had finally parked in the subterranean garage, there happened to be no one around. He placed the key with the large S on the wooden counter—and took the elevator up to the ground floor. He jumped into his pre-booked taxi and asked the driver to take him to the car dealership he had seen advertised online last night.
The salesperson was a young fellow who still had a few years to go before he hit thirty. He lit up when he realized what John was after: a black Chrysler 300 SRT8 that was ready for delivery.
“Automatic,” he added, to avoid any misunderstandings.
The salesperson showed him to a car a small distance away on the forecourt. John smiled to himself when he saw the cool grille and the raindrop-shaped xenon headlights glowering at him. This was completely unlike the joke he had left in the police station garage.
“Do you want to test-drive it?” the salesman said, dangling the keys in front of his nose.
“No, I want to buy it,” John said, pulling out his credit card.
Fifteen minutes later, the papers were signed and the deal concluded. The pleasure he felt when he left the dealership and headed out onto the E18 highway permeated his entire body. The Chrysler was a dream on the road thanks to its 470 horsepower and a 6.4-liter V8 under the hood.
John thought about his father. His old man had always talked about getting a new ride, but had never done anything about it. He had kept on running around in a battered pickup truck that had aged and died in parallel with him. John remembered the day he had driven it to the scrapyard and watched as the presses dug into the steel. It was the first and last time he had cried at his dad’s passing.
The American muscle car drew some attention when he pulled up outside the police station. John secretly reveled in the looks. He took the stairs to the second floor with more of a spring in his step than usual. He was about to knock on Primer’s door when he saw through the pane of glass that the boss had a visitor. A woman with hair as dark and glossy as a grand piano was sitting in one of the visitors’ chairs.
Primer seemed agitated. He was gesturing with his arms and leapt out of his seat several times. John could only see the visitor from behind, but she seemed to be the personification of calm.
“If you’re waiting for Primer, I’d give him a while to calm down,” a voice said.
John turned around and was met with Ulf Törner’s smirking face.
“That’s Erina Kabashi,” his colleague added. “She claims we haven’t followed protocol in a lineup where one of her clients was picked out.”
“So, a lawyer then?” said John.
“The worst kind. She mucked up a case last spring as well. The guy got off and the judge said some nasty things about shortcomings in the investigation. I can understand why the boss is pissed. She’s a real pain in the backside for us, but I can tell you this—if I was the accused, I’d be more than happy to have her defend me.”
John peered into the office again and made eye contact with Primer. He didn’t seem to appreciate his employees spying on him, and he pointedly turned the slats of the window blinds. The gesture was clear and John headed back to the stairs.
The account of his visit to Charlottenberg would have to wait for a better time, but now he had at least shown his face.
Ulf hurried after him.
“Hey, I was thinking about the kitchen schedule …”
John interrupted him.
“It’ll be fine,” he said, patting his colleague on the shoulder and then disappearing down the stairs.
John headed back out in the new car. He took the same route to Hammarö as he had the day before when he had visited his mother. This time he didn’t drive all the way to Skoghall—he turned off sooner and in a different direction, heading toward the Tynäs promontory and the beautiful world in which Emelie Bjurwall had gone to a party one night ten years ago.
He parked the Chrysler on the verge and walked the final few hundred meters up to Hugo Aglin’s house. It would be stupid to draw unnecessary attention to himself. He breathed in through his nose and searched for the hint of sulfur—but the unpleasant odor from the mill clearly didn’t make it to this side of the island. All he could smell was the scent of wet pine after the recent rain. He looked up at the sky. It had been dry when he had driven home from Charlottenberg the night before, but judging by the rapid scudding of the clouds and their ever-darkening contours, a new deluge was coming.
Hugo Aglin’s house was exactly as luxurious and over-the-top as he had expected. The façade was a combination of white render and larch paneling across three stories, with half of the top floor given over to a large terrace surrounded by translucent glass. John didn’t kno
w exactly what houses in the area cost, but there was no doubt that this was worth millions of kronor. Hugo Aglin had deep pockets. He had clearly been richly rewarded by the Bjurwalls over the course of his many years as director of finance at AckWe.
John tried to imagine the young people dancing and drinking up on the terrace. According to the police investigation, the son’s party had been boozy. Magnus—or Mange, as he was known—had said that Emelie Bjurwall had arrived together with her friend, who was called Maja. After a while, she had left the party alone to meet someone. Anton Lundberg, who had headed up the investigation at the time, had pushed hard to find out who this someone was. Magnus stubbornly maintained that he didn’t know.
John scanned the façade and spotted the steps leading from the terrace down into the garden. Perhaps that was the way Emelie had left. He imagined her opening the gate and passing the place where he was standing right now, before continuing along the path toward the water.
John followed the girl. He upped his pace so as not to lose the scent. He saw her right ahead of him—her blonde hair loose and flowing in the wind.
After a few minutes, the path petered out and there was nothing but rocks with the odd pine springing up between them. He stopped and caught his breath. It was beautiful here and it must have been the same on that August night ten years ago. He summoned the image of the shining moon reflected in the dark water and then followed Emelie down toward the lake.
It was easy to move over the rocks, as if nature herself had built a stone staircase down to the water’s edge. Once by the lake, he reconciled the surrounding terrain with the photos of the scene where the residue of the girl’s blood had been found. John had transferred the photos from the investigation to his phone so he could more easily identify the rocks. After a few minutes, he found the right one. He sat down and ran his hand over the rough surface. Something had happened to Emelie Bjurwall on this exact spot. Half a liter of blood had gushed out onto the rock and then she had vanished without a trace from the surface of the earth.